The NVIDIA GPUs Delivering The Best Performance Per Watt & Per Dollar For Linux Gamers
Following last week's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 launch I took the current complete NVIDIA desktop line-up of Maxwell GPUs and ran a second set of Linux OpenGL gaming tests on each of them while this time looking closely at the performance-per-dollar and performance-per-Watt performance. Here's the look at these NVIDIA Linux results if you're wanting to find the graphics processor delivering the best value as a Linux gamer.
Similar tests will be published this week for my line-up of AMD Radeon graphics cards under Linux in looking at the performance-per-dollar/Watt, with the tests today looking at just the current NVIDIA Maxwell line-up of the GTX 750 Ti and all GTX 900 series parts. In a later article, pending sufficient reader interest, I may also do a similar open-source comparison in looking at what delivers the best value. In this article the NVIDIA 355.06 beta driver was used for testing all of the hardware.
Our open-source automated benchmarking software, the Phoronix Test Suite, has long been capable of producing performance-per-Watt benchmark results when it's able to find a supported hardware sensor for querying the overall AC power draw. In the case of this GPU testing, the entire system power consumption was measured using a WattsUp power meter that's automatically read by the Phoronix Test Suite's Phodevi library. Usually in our Linux graphics card reviews we publish just a few performance-per-Watt results as it tends to be sufficient without information overload, but in this article are these extra numbers for each of the Linux games tested.
The performance-per-dollar benchmarking is a new feature in the Phoronix Test Suite Git code as of last week. I explained the performance-per-dollar benchmarking last week as the newest feature of our automated testing software. For this round of testing, the inputted graphics card costs were NVIDIA's current official prices for the GPUs where I was using NVIDIA reference samples except for cases where the tested hardware wasn't a reference sample, such as the EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW with it being a more expensive model, that price was used as listed on Amazon.com.
The tested line-up is the GeForce GTX 750 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and TITAN X. Games were tested at both 1080p and 4K. The Linux-native games benchmarked were Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Xonotic, Metro Last Light Redux, Metro 2033 Redux, Civilization Beyond Earth, BioShock Infinite, SuperTuxKart, Tesseract, and DiRT Showdown. While not a Linux game itself, Unigine Valley was also tested since it remains a great test of graphics card / driver capabilities on Linux.
On the following pages are all of the results for each individual game plus generated by the Phoronix Test Suite at the end is also the meta/composite results for the performance-per-dollar/Watt for each of the tested GPUs. Before getting started with this lengthy article, don't forget that by subscribing to Phoronix Premium you can support our site while viewing it ad-free and viewing long, multi-page articles like this all on a single page.